Indigenous sacred forest groves represent some of the earliest forms of conservation in the world. In Ghana, West Africa, sacred forest groves account for the approximately 1% of high canopy forest that remains outside the formal reserve system. In 2001 and again in 2005, I conducted year-long, systematic surveys of five small sacred forest groves and two larger forest reserves in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. These fragments were presumably originally once part of continuous forest cover, but now exist as isolated relicts of old growth forest embedded in farm bush savanna. My primary interest was to quantify the impact of forest fragmentation on forest, fruit-feeding butterfly communities in order to evaluate the value of indigenous management strategies for biodiversity conservation. Two to four, 200 meter transects of 4 to 5 fruit-bait traps each were established in each forest and sampled regularly over a two year period (June 2001- July 2002 and August 2005 – June 2006).
Results/Conclusions
Sites were sampled from 27-58 times, resulting in ~16,000 specimens from more than 120 species. Beta diversity between the sacred groves and forest reserves was generally high. Not surprising, observed species richness was highest in the largest forest reserve, suggesting that on the surface large reserves are the best biodiversity investment strategy. But the combined total richness of the small sacred groves was just as high as that of much larger reserves. Additionally, the presence of rarer forest specialists in the sacred groves suggests these patches harbor relic populations or serve as dispersal stepping stones across the landscape matrix. Finally, despite increased degradation of the sacred groves, community diversity remained relatively stable across study years. In combination, these data argue that small indigenous reserves are effectively conserving important elements of forest biodiversity in Ghana and should be integrated into the country’s protected areas network.
